The New Yorker, which published Oe’s essay, was the magazine that in 1946 published John Hersey’s Hiroshima, 2 where, for the first time through the narratives of bomb victims, American readers were confronted with the human consequences of the events that had unfolded under the mushroom cloud. To repeat the error by exhibiting, through the construction of nuclear reactors, the same disrespect for human life is the worst possible betrayal of the memory of Hiroshima’s victims. The Japanese should not be thinking of nuclear energy in terms of industrial productivity. Two weeks after the disaster, author Oe Kenzaburo wrote , This time, however, Japan inflicted it on itself. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nuclear reactor meltdown and explosion at four reactors at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant was the third large-scale nuclear disaster to hit Japan. On March 11, 2011, an earthquake and tsunami along the Pacific coastline of Northeastern Japan brought devastation reminiscent of the 1945 atomic and incendiary bombing that devastated whole towns, littering them with the bodies of victims and posing a continuing threat to survivors. Fukushima and Okinawa – the “Abandoned People,” and Civic Empowerment
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